


Your Bottled Little Part

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Series: Take Me To The Stars [25]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Bathrooms, Chaos, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-10-04 17:16:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20474678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: The Doctor makes a beauty faux-pas, which Clara attempts to rectify.





	Your Bottled Little Part

**Author's Note:**

> From the prompt:
> 
> _13 + Clara and hair dye? (let’s face it, 13 would probably accidentally dye Clara's ENTIRE bathroom purple if she ever dyed her hair)_

The TARDIS smells different. Clara can’t put her finger on it exactly; she’s used to the ever-changing smell of the Doctor’s TARDIS by now, but this is something that seems oddly familiar in a way that she can’t quite bring to mind. There’s something faintly nostalgic about it, and chemical, and she follows her nose along the corridor in search of its source, her eyes starting to water as she gets nearer and nearer to the bathroom that looks, to her untrained human eyes at least, exactly like the Prefects’ Bathroom in _Harry Potter_. Honestly, she wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the Doctor had given JK Rowling a tour of the time machine and the author had appropriated some ideas; the Doctor had never been exactly shy about showing off, and the TARDIS is an excellent source of inspiration.

The smell, as she draws closer, becomes increasingly, burningly chemical. It makes Clara’s nose and eyes sting, although it remains oddly familiar, and because of that she can’t quite bring herself to dislike it. As she reaches for the door handle and turns it, Clara runs through options in her mind, trying to work out which product could be emanating such an acrid smell. It’s something from her youth, that much she’s certain of. Is it nail varnish remover, perhaps? Hair removal cream? Surgical spirit?

As the door swings inwards, the answer reveals itself in a blaze of luridly colourful glory, and she lets out an involuntary gasp. 

The walls of the bathroom are daubed in vast arcing streaks of vivid plum, from head height down to the edges of the floor, with each streak in the faint shape of handprints. The marble tiles that Clara so enjoys feeling under her bare feet in the evenings are hued a faint shade of lavender, and the sink is full of a roiling, lightly-steaming liquid the colour of richest aubergine. The enormous, sunken bath is full of amethyst-tinted water with turquoise bubbles as large as footballs skimming across the surface, and right in the middle of this purple-coloured chaos is sat the Doctor, perched on the edge of a worktop and staring pointedly down at the floor. She’s dressed in an enormous, patchy smock that Clara suspects may once have belonged to an Impressionist, and not a lot else, and her expression is one of utter embarrassment, her soaking wet hair plastered against her scalp 

Hair that is decidedly not-blonde, not anymore, but is decidedly not-purple either. It’s a particularly unattractive shade that’s somewhere between mud-brown and black, and it’s singularly awful.

“Ah,” Clara says with absolute calmness, as though this is a completely normal occurrence. It had been, once, but that was another time and another place; not to mention another head. Dealing with your own catastrophic hair colour errors renders you relatively shock-proof. “Hair dye. I knew I recognised the smell from somewhere. Going blonde at seventeen.”

“Clara,” the Doctor wails, appearing very close to tears. “Clara, this is _rubbish_. The girl on the box has purple hair, and I want purple hair as well! I did everything it said – alright, I might’ve got distracted and popped off to ancient Mesopotamia while it was developing – but that’s neither here nor there. My hair isn’t purple. It’s just… pants, and boring, and not-purple.”

“How long did you get distracted _for_?”

“Urm,” the Doctor chews on her lip as she thinks, her cheeks tinging a faint but discernible shade of pink as she does so. “A couple of days? Ish? I figured the longer I left this on, the better.”

Clara stifles a groan. “You absolute…” she sighs in exasperation. “You’ve wrecked your hair, and you’ve wrecked the bathroom. You’ve probably wrecked your bloody coat, and all…” 

“The bathroom will clean itself,” the Doctor protests, gesticulating to the chaos surrounding them. “My coat is fine; it’s survived much worse. And my hair isn’t _wrecked_, but even so… I could just regenerate it.” 

“_No,” _Clara half-shouts, holding up her hands warningly. “You are not wasting your regeneration energy on your beauty cock-ups. And yes, the bathroom will clean itself, but I don’t imagine your ship is particularly pleased about any of this. Are you, old girl?”

The TARDIS gives a warble of bemused agreement, and Clara laughs. 

“Well, at least your thief has been suitably well punished,” Clara wrinkles her nose, turning her attention back to the Doctor. “Seriously, you’re lucky your hair isn’t bloody falling out in clumps. What have you even got? Space hair? Is it indestructible?”

“It’s not space hair,” the Doctor mutters, dropping her gaze to the floor and chewing at one purple-tinged thumbnail. “It’s just… resilient.” 

“Apparently not that resilient, or it wouldn’t be… whatever colour that is. Sludge.” 

“Sludge is not a colour.” 

“Well, what do you call whatever the hell that is?” 

“A disaster,” the Doctor lets out another wail of remorse, looking back up at Clara with overt desperation. “An absolute disaster, and I’m sorry, alright? Can’t you fix it? Is there a human-y way to fix it? Please tell me there is; Yaz’ll never let me live this down. Nor will the others, but especially not Yaz. I’m begging you.” 

“Well,” Clara sighs, crouching beside her partner and wrapping her arms around the Time Lady reassuringly, all the while leaning far enough away to avoid any of the unappealing-coloured hair touching her. The smell is much, much stronger close to, and she wonders again how on earth the Doctor’s hair isn’t destroyed. “There is, but you’re not going to like it.” 

“Will it hurt?” the Doctor asks, eyes wide and wet with unshed tears, her bottom lip starting to tremble in apprehension of the news Clara is about to deliver.

“No,” Clara says patiently, suppressing the urge to laugh. “But it’s going to take hours. And it’s going to smell really, really bad.”

* * *

One trip to Boots, two bottles of Hair B4 and some considerable – determinedly linear – hours later, the Doctor’s hair is approximately the right shade again. There’s a faint tinge of brown that Clara ignores in favour of turning up the TARDIS’s ventilation system to disperse the nasty, chemical smell, and then she sets to work towel-drying the damp, wavy mass before her, while the Doctor mixes together the chemicals she’s holding with rapt attention, shaking the ensuing product with gleeful enthusiasm.

“Right,” Clara says sternly, looking at the Doctor in the mirror and attempting her best teacher voice. “There are going to be absolutely no side-trips to ancient Mesopotamia this time.” 

“What if there’s another invasion of Cybermats to deal with?” 

“There will be absolutely no side-trips to ancient Mesopotamia,” Clara repeats more loudly, accepting the bottle that the Doctor holds out to her. “Alright?” 

“Fine, “ the Doctor mutters sulkily, her shoulders slumping in defeat. “I suppose I can live with that.”

“Too right you can. Or do you want to have to clean the entire bathroom by hand again?”

The Doctor meets her gaze in the mirror, and Clara laughs aloud at the horror laid bare in her partner’s expression. 

“Look,” she says in a conciliatory tone, squirting dye onto the first section of hair and starting to rub it between her begloved fingertips. “At least you’re back in the TARDIS’s good books.”

“I was always in them.” 

“No, you weren’t. You ruined her favourite bathroom.” 

“I didn’t ruin it; I spontaneously updated the colour scheme.” 

“You ruined it. You ruined _my _favourite bathroom. You owe me a lifetime of shared morning baths now.” 

“If you wanted those,” the Doctor says with faux irritation. “You could have just asked, and I’d happily have granted your wish.” 

“My way is more fun,” Clara taps the top of the Doctor’s head warningly. “Besides, you looked _so _fetching with tinfoil on your head, scrubbing the sides of the bath. How could I deny myself that pleasure?” 

“Sadist,” the Doctor grouses under her breath. “Actual sadist.”

“Sadist who is currently responsible for not turning your hair sludge-coloured again,” Clara reminds her tartly, and the Doctor lapses into apologetic silence.

* * *

“There,” Clara finishes drying the Doctor’s hair and then runs a hairbrush through it for the final time, smoothing it down around the Time Lady’s cheeks and giving it a final little ruffle with her fingertips for dramatic effect. “All done.”

“Can I look now?” 

“Yes,” Clara chuckles, feeling a surge of pride in her efforts. “You can.” 

The Doctor gets to her feet from her cross-legged position on Clara’s bedroom floor, stretching like a cat before darting over to the mirror and examining the end result. Her hair is falling around her face in loose violet waves, and it contrasts strikingly with her eyes. 

“Wow,” the Time Lady breathes, seemingly lost for words. “It’s…” 

“Very you,” Clara wrinkles her nose fondly. “But I reckon blue would’ve been better.” 

“Well, we can do blue next time,” the Doctor says, running her hand through her hair with pleasure. “But first… I think it’s your turn for a wild colour.” 


End file.
